AI is Penning the Next Game of Thrones Book—and It's Magnificent

Game of Thrones came to a crazy—and I mean cra-za-zy—finale on Sunday, tying up plenty of loose ends, confirming fan theories and generally leaving us wanting more dragons, more Jon Snow, more, well everything. But now that winter’s finally here, we have to wait until 2019 for the last season of the show.

Adding insult to injury, writer George RR Martin is taking forever to deliver the sixth novel, the penultimate in the series.

Lucky for us, artificial intelligence (AI) has stepped into the breach, penning its own GoT novel. Yes!! Creator Zack Thoutt bills it as “the book we’re all waiting for.”

Call it what you will—“Geek of Thrones”, anyone?—but a specially trained neural network has pasted the first five chapters of this masterpiece on Github already—and you know you’re gonna read it.

“Writing the code for the model and training it only took a few days of work, and after turning the model’s hyperparameters, I started to get some interesting results,” Thoutt said, on the Udacity blog.

Interesting indeed. To wit:

“The next morning he awoke another hundred feet above the winesink beside the temple with a battering wall, like the wall a pack looming ominous. His right leg was solid below. He ended that tight. To show, summer came as well as he had and the intruder sept bowlegged one great younger man all gathered in front of the rocking of iron chains, his foot short of black steel and the cold old shadow. The shield in his hand bobbed, leaving a third of his neck in the dangling water.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m totally into this. I want a winesink. I want to know what happened to the other two-thirds of his neck!

The AI knows its characters too:

“Jaime yelped, in the dirt, and came to climb off beside his bedchamber, and we could almost find the tunnel at once, but we’d shut it without battle if she sings, then…the rats come home to their lives!”

Thoutt, a Udacity Nanodegree program graduate, is dreaming of sailing across the AI development barrier, like Daenerys sailed across the Narrow Sea. Father of AIs, breaker of code!

“People have dreamed and speculated about the potential of AI for decades, but I think that technology is finally on the cusp of breaking through the barrier between interesting toy projects and legitimate software that can dramatically increase the efficiency of humankind,” he said. “My GOT AI is a small taste of what is possible with deep learning.”

Well, huzzah! Or as the book says: “Aye, you need to speak of a hundred seasoned cloaks, mutton, fish and crimson silk, Sam could give back the smith, and for before there had been fallen.”